Washington Examiner
Washington Examiner
The public school system had stopped teaching children long before the pandemic
Washington Examiner - Monday
If the academic year now ending has taught us anything, it’s that the public school system would rather indoctrinate than educate its students.
The school system was created to teach students academically and morally, and to prepare them for the next phase of life. The pandemic proved that most public schools will abandon this responsibility when given the opportunity.
Instead of returning to in-person instruction as soon as the science dictated, public school officials clung to superstitions and refused to ditch remote learning. We knew as early as May 2020 that COVID-19 is not a threat to children and that classrooms are not the super-spreader sites teachers feared they would be. The failure to reopen for the 2020-2021 school year is inexcusable, and blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the nation's teachers unions. But the implications go far beyond excoriating the unions.
The results of this distance learning experiment have been devastating. Students in all grades began failing their classes at alarming rates, and many just stopped virtually showing up. One poll found that teachers nationwide expect at least one-third of their students to repeat a grade because of how much learning they’ve lost. In North Carolina, more than half of the state’s high school students who took end-of-course standardized exams received “not proficient” scores.
Low-income and minority children were hit hardest by malingering within public school systems. A December analysis by consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that white students were one to three months behind where their learning should have been in mathematics, but nonwhite students were three to five months behind. It could take students of color years to catch up, educators have predicted.
None of this seems to bother the public school administrators, who moved on from traditional subjects such as mathematics a long time ago in search of a more social justice-friendly curriculum devoid of true educational content. According to this new curriculum, it does not matter to the public school system whether students flunk out of biology, as long as they understand the unscientific topic of transgenderism and the “gender spectrum.” Classic literature has been deemed culturally insensitive, replaced by more modern and woke readings, such as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist.
Pandemic or not, public schools haven’t been interested in teaching your children for a long time.
This is not an exaggeration. Unsuspecting public school parents across the country have shared horror stories about the leftist propaganda their children are being taught. In New York, for example, the Fairport Central School District released a new curriculum this year that requires fourth graders to sit in “restorative justice” circles, in which they are taught that racism is deeply embedded in their community.
In Virginia, the Loudoun County Public Schools district was caught passing out a graphic to students that described Christians and white people as “privileged” groups, while women and minorities were described as “oppressed.” The "privileged" groups, according to the district's diversity training, contribute to a “white supremacy culture,” from which the oppressed groups suffer. That is, if you are a Christian, you are an oppressor.
In Iowa, the Ames Community School District required students at all grade levels to participate in a “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action,” during which they were given a coloring book page that said, “Everyone gets to choose if they are a girl or a boy or both or neither or someone else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”
This kind of nonsense is happening everywhere. It does not matter whether you live in a blue or red state — if your children attend a public school, this is what they are learning. As former Attorney General Bill Barr recently put it, what's happening in the public school system is a “full-blown” attempt to subvert the traditional Western values that a good education confers, and to replace them with the radical orthodoxy of the new Left. Teaching students they can choose their own gender doesn’t just undermine basic science and parental authority, he said, but it also attacks “the very idea of natural law.” Forcing deeply controversial and divisive ideologies such as critical race theory upon young children is nothing less than an attempt to make them little Marxists, he added; just replace “racial antagonism for class antagonism.”
Parents need to see the public school system for what it is. It has failed our children academically, but that failure was deliberate. Public schools don’t want to teach students the stuff that matters. They want to teach children to be leftists who cannot keep up in their academic subjects.
Unfortunately, the pandemic made that goal a lot easier. The only way this trend will be reversed is if parents wake up and take their children elsewhere — before it’s too late.
The public school system had stopped teaching children long before the pandemic
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